


Why do you Write?

by AraniWrites



Category: Writer - Fandom
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-15
Updated: 2015-10-15
Packaged: 2018-04-26 13:32:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,024
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5006617
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AraniWrites/pseuds/AraniWrites
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Seemingly simple question, but the answer is much harder to explain.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Why do you Write?

There are a few questions people ask me on a regular basis. The answer I usually have to give is something along the lines of “Because I love it”. But I felt like the question deserved a more in depth answer.

“Why are you a writer?” “Where do you get your inspiration?” “How do you come up with so many ideas?” This is usually followed up with “I could never create something like this.”. I feel as though a simple four word answer no longer covers it. I want to make what I see perfectly clear. This is what I hope for you all to understand.

Plainly speaking, there is no short answer to these questions. No, I do not magically push some big red button and an idea comes to mind. No, I do not ignore the world around me in favor of the worlds I create. And no, writing is NOT easy. It’s not something I was born fantastic at. It’s hard. It’s work. It’s effort and a whole lot of disappointment and the occasional self-loathing. It’s something I’ve spent half my lifetime developing and practicing. But these things we live through to find beautiful and wonderful things that can only come from the creativeness of our own consciousness.

To answer such questions, one must first understand the mind of a writer. Many people believe that we are constantly filled with never ending ideas and settings and stories, never able to focus on anything else. And while this is partially true, it is a huge misunderstanding of how our minds work and process information. So to understand the mind of a writer, you must first know what fills our minds.

To start with, the majority of a writers mind is a void. A big, black, empty void. Gradually, as we gain experiences and learn new concepts and forge new ideas, this void begins to fill. It fills with words, places we’ve been, fuzzy memories and names of people we can’t remember to save our lives. It is a pile of content shoved into our minds from everything we see, smell, touch and experience. And they live in a mass, there is no order, no law, it is a controlled chaos of swirling winds that never cease, never go away, that at night fill our minds with so many thoughts sleep seems like a foreign object. It is a place we writers often visit to gather information, to pull ideas from a pile, to crack a fortune cookie and try to discern its meaning. But this is not where the writer stays, nor is this where we work.

There’s a place in the writers mind I refer to as Home. For me, it lives in the darkness when I close my eyes. Just behind my eyelids, whenever I blink, whenever I sleep. There’s a house that sits there, a big, deformed mansion that is never one set color, size or shape. It sits on the top of a large hill, surrounded by gardens and green fields, peaceful in every way. This is where imagination lives. This is where I do my work as a writer. This is where every character, every idea I’ve ever created no matter how big or small lives. Where they all coexist and wait for their turn to have their story told.

The characters that live here, that includes myself, exist together in one universe, talking and laughing and learning off of one another. They tell each other their stories, they bounce ideas around and throw in opinions. The inspiration comes from how all of these personalities, all of these people, react to certain things I see or experiences. Music I hear, books I read, things people say to me all come here, go through each and every person, and they all have their own thoughts and opinions. Inspiration comes from how they deal with things presented to them. Creativity comes when they prompt me to do the same.

Let me put it this way: There is no seeing to a writer. There is no simple walk down a street. When I walk down a street, I don’t see a simple street. I see possibilities. I look at everything around me and ask time and time again “what if…” What if a monster attacked this town right now? What if the sidewalk I’m standing on suddenly became a forest path? What if that man walking the street turned left instead of right? The question of What If is the most important question any writer can propose, because its endings are endless, it’s solutions know no boundaries, it can refer to anything and mean anything and that is what defines inspiration. The ability to see possibility, not probability.

Not only do we see possibilities, but we see stories. No matter what we or others do, we stick stories onto everyone we see, onto everything we do, because everyone and everything has a story to tell, big or small, recent or ancient. The tree I just passed is a magical tree and it needs to be saved. Every house on this block was built to defend the Fountain of Youth. That couple walking in front of me are spies sent to discover a world-wide nuclear threat. When I look into the night sky I don’t see stars. I see what might be beyond the stars, I see what kinds of worlds are waiting to be discovered, what kinds of galaxies there may be. When I look a constellations, they move, they dance, they explore and watch us as we watch them. They place names to the cities we build that glow in the night and make their own stories on how it was formed. The human mind is grown and defined from stories. The breakthroughs of any scientist stemming from the questions that begin from What If. The first pictures of Pluto becoming possibility, not probability, from one person looking up into that night sky and wondering what they might find there.

But this alone is not enough to create something new. I don’t pull ideas from a magic hat filled with rabbits and flowers. When an idea is presented to me, it is questioned by every character I’ve ever created. When I am faced with a new challenge or experience there are a hundred other voices gasping and applauding just as I am. The ideas come from how the characters I myself create react to the things I myself experience. Reading the fact that Mars has water on its surface opens a door of possibility, and suddenly I am faced with a hundred questions from a hundred people, do Martians exist, how does Mars still have water, are aliens trying to trick us, are we all insane and is this not real at all? The stories written come from the questions. No one can write a story from nothing. Creativity must always come from something.

And in the end, I don’t only gain questions, I gain answers. I learn and grow from the way those characters within me react and explore and experience. Because in the end, every character a writer will ever make is, in some way, part of them. The character that is my polar opposite can still hold a trait I possess. My greatest Villain can hold my fear of spiders. My most loved Hero can hold my jealous habits. The reactions from such characters give growth and answers, ways I might react in a situation or questions I may have for a situation. There is no character that I cannot learn from, cannot grow from, because they are all, in one way or another, me.

In this house, in the very back down a quiet hallway, is a Parlor that’s just for me. It’s a place that I can lock and not allow anyone into. It is a gateway to my memories, to that void I spoke of before. But it is also where the words come from. The words you see on a page do not appear out of thin air. When I write, I am not coming up with a story. I am listening to a story my character is telling me, a story that has already long-since happened. My job, as the writer, is to put these words into a format people can understand. Because while people can look at what I’ve written here and understand that words are on the page, there is no one but me that can look inside my mind and understand what they find there. As the writer I am that bridge between the character and the reader. 

So the question of “Where do you get your inspiration?” is not something easily answered. We get inspiration from everything around us. From the tiniest nut to the giant oak tree. From the newborn human to the one-hundred year old grandmother. From everything we experience, we create, we explore, we ask What If and go from there. To say we are unfocused is an insult. In fact, we are hyper focused, keen to pick up on everything going on, we need to analyze and process and ask questions, so much so that we miss a lot more then we dare admit, this is never intentional. “How do you come up with so many ideas?” I get ideas from the things I see, and from how those personalities react to it. I ask myself what a character would do. I ask myself what someone I know would do. It is the simple act of asking questions that leads to ideas, ideas lead to stories, stories lead to infinite possibilities. The simple question of What If leads to more possibilities than any other question one can ask.

“Why are you a writer?” Because I want to share what I find in the experiences of life. I want people to see things the way I see them and gain a new perspective. I want to give others an idea, a spark to ignite their inspiration and creativity, to inspire others to show what they find beautiful and wonderful and magical in the world. I don’t create the worlds in my stories from nothing, it’s based off of something I’ve read or seen or experienced, and it is the duty of a writer to share that spark, to give others that base to launch themselves off of, to bare inspiration to others just as we ourselves were given that spark. In the words of Lord Byron, “If I don’t write to empty my mind, I go mad”. Because if the world ended tomorrow, I want to know that today I created something no one else could. Something that could only come from me.

And the funny thing about it all is, everyone can do it. We all experience life. We all see life in different and creative ways. You may not see the same object I do. You may put a different story to something than I would. That is creativity, that is the spark needed to write what you wish to write. The words you put on paper come from your own mind, from the way you look at the world, in a way only you can see the world. It is what you see when you close your eyes and just listen. It is the things you dream in the dead of night. It is the way you express yourself. It is the way you walk on the path you make in our world of constant roadblocks.

I’m not saying writing is easy. But the creativity, the spark, is something everyone has. Something we all, in one way or another, can express. Through art, music, words or dance. Through life’s experiences. Because in the end, what matters is not how others view the world you see, it is how you view the world you see. And from that, you can create anything, you can inspire, move and conquer, to make something ordinary into something extraordinary. 

And that, in its own way, is the most beautiful spark of all. The spark of possibility.


End file.
